


Our Sort Of Happy Ending

by shopfront



Category: The Girl with All the Gifts - M. R. Carey
Genre: Bittersweet Fix-it, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Found Family, Post-Canon, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-20
Updated: 2019-08-20
Packaged: 2020-09-01 00:17:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20249026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shopfront/pseuds/shopfront
Summary: It almost drives him mad, watching her sit in front of the creatures that nearly tore her apart and recite the alphabet.





	Our Sort Of Happy Ending

**Author's Note:**

  * For [StopTalkingAtMe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/StopTalkingAtMe/gifts).

That night comes back to him in his dreams. Flashes of filed teeth and grey rain and the look on Helen’s face when she'd awoken to discover what he and Melanie had done. The snap of the flak-jacketed kid’s head flying back (and he was a kid to Eddie now, even in his nightmares, even if part of him still rebelled at the thought) when Eddie had lashed out, and the searing pain of bone broken in a struggle that only narrowly averted a bite.

Sometimes he still wakes up sweating and rubbing at his arm throughout the night, feeling exactly where his flesh could have - should have, _would have_ \- torn if Melanie had ridden to the rescue a minute later.

Other days he wakes up to the heat of Helen’s body curved around his own. There’s always one long crystalline moment before he remembers the safety Rosie offers, one where he wonders how they’ve come to this. Where had they gone wrong, what stupid decision had they made in the heat of the moment to end up here? Guards down, scattered on the floor along with their clothes as they lie together in sleep as defenceless as babes before the many onslaughts of this world.

When he’s really lucky, he wakes up in that slow, drowsy way that nobody really has for twenty years. Rising gradually into consciousness so that the memories take their time filtering back in. It’s an almost forgotten pleasure to wake up feeling safe. It also doesn’t happen very often.

*

It’s the long mending of his broken arm that grates on him the most at first. Getting the suit on to leave the bus is almost impossible without jostling the injury, and Helen rightly points out that they have no ready means of fixing him up if he makes the damage worse. So he sits in the godforsaken bus alone and stews while he watches Helen hold her class.

It almost drives him mad, watching her sit in front of the creatures that nearly tore her apart and recite the alphabet. Knowing, if worst came to worst, that there wouldn’t be anything he could do from inside that would be quick enough to help.

She’s radiant each evening as she strokes Melanie’s hair goodbye before she enters to start the disinfection procedure. There’s no need to talk about her day - he could see all of it, anyway, lurking suspiciously by the windows - and she never seems to feel the need to discuss it. But something about it fills her up inside. He can see it happening and he’s reluctantly happy for her; for both of them even, when she reaches more often for his hand and starts squeezing into his bunk beside him after a good day.

There’s no repeat of turning out the lights. Not at first. They just lie close to another person, calmly breathing each other in. It’s a strange sort of peace that ends each morning for Eddie when she steps into the airlock again.

*

Melanie’s the one who decides on a schedule for them all. Helen shies away from things that remind her too much of her last classroom, but Melanie convinces the others to help her draw a giant calendar on the other side of the bus anyway. She reveals her secret tally of the days and counts out exactly how long they had spent on that hellish walk through the countryside. The seasons don't seem to be coming or going at first, and Helen admits one night that she has no idea what the new wave of fungus might have done to the natural world beyond their inner city bubble. But Melanie wants lessons five days a week so that's what they do, covering history and stories and practising reading and writing once the kids have scavenged for books and stationary.

On Saturdays, Melanie asks Eddie to rig up the music player to blast sound outside and Helen shows them how to dance or how to use the newest piece of play equipment they've found and dragged home. She shows them new ways to find joy in moving their bodies just because, even if they don’t need to exercise to maintain their strength.

Sometimes the noise brings the older ones (_hungries, monsters - no, don’t let the kids hear you call them that_) to their door, but the kids make quick work of them and soon there aren’t any older ones left in hearing distance. It doesn’t take long for Melanie to realise the others don’t need her for that. She starts to retreat into the bus with them, ready to stand guard if something should go wrong. To fight for them if it’s needed. There’s a joy to those hunts which Melanie can’t share, a sport to it just like their other Saturday activities which Eddie can see even from a distance and behind glass.

At first he watches from afar, his jaw set and his eyes narrowed. Over time he starts to twitch, to watch for little faces that disappear into shadowed doorways and take too long to come back out. To hope they don't come back, or only very occasionally to hope that they will. Eventually he starts to turn away as well, to strike up a conversation when Helen's watching looks are laden with concern and Melanie's eyes look haunted.

On Sundays, the kids go looking for food. First they come back with things by the armful for Helen and Eddie. They leave it all in heaps by the doors for Melanie to bring inside later. Then they disappear again, and-

On Sundays, Helen and Eddie get time to themselves. To talk, to rest, to savour the quiet until the kids come back with barely scrubbed rust stains painting their mouths which don’t bother them and that Helen steadfastly ignores, but that make Melanie look sad. 'It will take time,' he hears Helen whispering to Melanie on the nights she comes into the bus to spend time with them after. 'It’s okay. They’re doing well.'

He never admits that he looks forward to those nights now. Playing with an old pack of cards they'd found tucked behind one of the bunks and laughing, just the three of them. If Melanie’s going to turn on them now-

Some things just aren’t worth guarding against anymore.

On Sundays, Helen keeps Eddie from going mad. On Sundays, Helen also spends the entire day in adult company. Sometimes he sees a look in her eye and thinks (hopes) that maybe he’s keeping her from going a different sort of mad, too.

_*_

By the time his arm's strong enough to satisfy Helen, Eddie doesn’t see the point in going outside much. Their kids scavenge plenty of supplies for them and there’s nothing else out there for them anymore. There’s not even relief in getting out of the tin can, because he still carries the bastard bus with him in protective clingfilm that dulls his senses and hampers his movements and might not even save his life if he accidentally tears it too far from home.

Instead he sets to organising the bus with a vengeance. They don’t have any scientists anymore or anything to bother studying, so out goes the containment cages and the microscopes and the slicer and dicer that only makes him grimace and think of Caldwell. Bit by bit they make space. First to do push ups and jump rope and keep Eddie from going out of his damn mind with inactivity. But then he and Helen start to fill in the little gaps with things, some made and some scavenged. One day he looks around and realises that Gallagher probably would have called it a strange cocoon of stuff, and it gives him a pang but it also brings a smile to his lips.

They replace the tiny bunks with a proper bed, albeit one cobbled together from the smaller mattresses, and they convert the original sleeping spaces into storage for things they haven't decided whether to keep or not. They even christen their new bed together, laughing dementedly when they realise they might be the last people to ever indulge in such a tradition. The laughter fades to tears as they cling to each other, skin to skin.

Helen decides they should keep the computers and Caldwell’s notes. Melanie’s strangely reverent of them despite her hatred of the woman who wrote them, and Eddie catches her adding to them with stumbling, awkward little scratchings in the depths of those first nights after the Burning.

When Melanie’s done, she asks if he can take over for her. Says Miss Justineau told her that even if she gave lessons every day for the rest of her life that she couldn’t cover all the known knowledge of the people who had gone before them. Asks if Eddie will help, will write things down that Miss Justineau hasn’t told them. Things for other kids like them to read one day.

He laughs her off. Thinks of Caldwell’s derision at the idea of his being a scientist, of being smart in the sort of way Helen and Melanie are. But that night as he falls asleep with Helen firmly in his arms, he also remembers the look on Gallagher’s face in the outskirts of London and the moments they didn’t think he’d seen when Melanie had pointed at things and started explaining. Thinks of all the things she’d stared at too, struck dumb by her gaps in knowledge of the old things he took for granted.

In the morning he picks up a pen with his good hand. He puts it down at the end of the day without a single word written and greets Helen with relief, buries his hands in her hair and kisses her deeply in search of distraction. But the next morning, he still picks it up again.

*

_In the beginning, there was a city where millions of people lived. They were hungry three times a day and many of them travelled around the city or the world to do things just for the fun of it._


End file.
